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“The American public expects its leaders to put an end to governing by crisis and to focus on promoting economic growth and job creation,” Lew wrote. “I respectfully urge Congress to take action to raise the debt limit at the earliest possible moment and ideally well before February 7, 2014.”

Congress was able to enact a budget deal this month, but it failed to address the debt ceiling issue, leaving open the possibility of another fiscal showdown next spring.

This week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he doesn’t believe the next debt ceiling increase will be “clean,” a sign that Republicans may attempt to win political concessions, such as reductions in spending, in exchange for raising the borrowing cap.

The administration maintains it will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, arguing it is the job of Congress to make sure the government doesn’t default on its obligations.

Republicans “will encounter the same position from the President that he held in October,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters on Wednesday. “This is not something to be trifled with. It is not something to be horse-traded over.”

In his letter, Lew laid out the administration’s estimate for when the government will run out of borrowing authority.

In October, Congress passed a bill that suspended the debt limit through Feb. 7. After this point, the Treasury Department will have to resort to so-called “extraordinary measures” — a set of accounting procedures that would temporarily allow the government to continue borrowing.

Lew warned that Treasury estimates it is unlikely that these extraordinary measures would last much past the Feb. 7 deadline because during the months of February and March the government typically sees large cash outflows in the form of tax refunds.

“While this forecast is subject to inherent variability, we do not foresee any reasonable scenario in which the extraordinary measures would last for an extended period of time,” he wrote.